The Illusionist

book review

The Illusionist
Larson works his magic on another historic tale

By Orli Van Mourik

A month ago, if someone had asked me what the chances were that I would read and enjoy a book about the evolution of wireless telegraphy, I would have answered: slim to none. When I heard about Erik Larson's new book, “Thunderstruck,” the odds went up significantly. I knew if anyone was capable of igniting my interest in a topic that leaves everyone cold (apart from HAM radio aficionados), Larson was the guy.

Those familiar with Larson's work know he has a peculiar gift. He can take a story few deem worth telling and make it into a page-turner. I'll go out on a limb here and say that prior to the publication of Larson's last book, “The Devil in the White City,” the number of people who professed an ardent interest in the Chicago World's Fair hovered in the low five digits. Nonetheless, his exhaustive chronicle of the events and personalities that drove the construction of the 1893 fair became a sensation.

Part of the success of “Devil” is due to Larson's literary prowess. He's one of the few nonfiction authors whose rampant enthusiasm for his subject shines through in his prose, and his passion is infectious.

It's also clear that writing back-to-back historical nonfiction novels has made Larson into something of an archive connoisseur. He spent months at Oxford's New Bodleian Library and London's National Archives steeping himself in the fractious history of wireless and the realities of life in turn-of-the-century England. His knowledge of the material is so complete he's able to bring the most quotidian descriptions to life. We are told, for instance, that the stolid, middle-class men from the Michigan neighborhood the book's villain Hawley Harvey Crippen grew up in during the late 1800s sported facial hair so strange it looked as if “someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction.”

As enriching as these descriptions are, Larson does suffer from occasional bouts of intellectual myopia. To him, everything about the period is fascinating. The reader, however, may find himself less than enthralled by the history of hansom cabs and 19th century trends in urban planning. But these digressions don't detract from the forward momentum of the narrative and its protagonist, Guglielmo Marconi.

We in the 21st century are in the habit of minimizing the significance of past technological advances. But if it weren't for Marconi, we might not be enjoying inventions like cell phones, email, and WiFi, all of which send information via Hertzian waves, discovered in 1888 by German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Up until his death, Hertz maintained that the mysterious electromagnetic waves he'd identified - what we now call radio waves - were “of no use whatsoever.” Marconi believed otherwise.

One day in the summer of 1894, while vacationing with his family in the Italian Alps, the 20-year-old experienced a flash of insight. Despite receiving no formal instruction in physics (in fact, very little education at all), Marconi became convinced that it was possible to use Hertz's invisible rays to transmit messages through the air over great distances. “Nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible,” Larson tells us.

So uncanny was the idea of sending messages through the ether that Marconi's first public demonstration of his technology, in 1896, left the audience utterly thunderstruck (hence the title of the book). Many simply did not believe their eyes, and thought it an elaborate magic trick. The more credulous believed it was ghosts. Even those in the scientific community who understood the physics behind Marconi's invention contended that it would never amount to more than a parlor trick.

The self-styled inventor would spend the better part of the next 25 years combating the distrust and outright hostility of the scientific establishment. But by the early 1920s, after enduring endless setbacks, Marconi had successfully established a network of wireless stations throughout the Europe and U.S.

“Thunderstruck” is not without its problems. As in “The Devil in the White City,” Larson helps make the bitter pill of history go down smoothly by threading a murder mystery throughout the book. But compared to Henry H. Holmes, who murdered untold numbers of people (some say as many as 200) in “Devil,” the meek, bespectacled Hawley Harvey Crippen of “Thunderstruck” killed just one. As grizzly as his crime was, the mystery is relatively thin.

Thankfully, the story of Marconi's campaign to bring wireless telegraphy to the public is compelling enough to carry the book. Once again, Larson has succeeded in transforming a superficially dry and technical tale into gripping reading. Like Dickens, Larson has an innate gift for melodrama, a sense of the absurd, and the ability to make the most dastardly characters somehow sympathetic.